JOURNEY TO SRI LANKA
or as it turned out - PONDICHERRY
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED
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As I have explained several times already I start with "This is what happened" because one of the inevitable drawbacks of booking tomorrows hotel/flight/tour late the day before means that what we plan often changes because we are too late to get what we planned or as a result of last minute better ideas popping up.
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I left that bit in because we are not yet going to Sri Lanka. We are going south to PONDICHERRY and then east to KERELA. At least I think we are.
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The issue was RAIN. It looked a bit wet in Sri Lanka, but sunny in Kerela, so ...... Kerela. By Train.
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LET THE TRAIN TAKE THE STRAIN
The ANANTHAPURI EXPRESS, overnight from Chennai to Kollum, 13 hours by sleeper train. Why not? It is after all only a two hour flight so why not take that you may ask. Good question. But we love train adventures!!! Only problem is all the First Class 1A A/C Coupe (two bunk) carriages are booked, unsurprising as it is Pungal (bank Holiday 4 day close down, massive party festival). No matter - we have found our man. Tamil (his name not ethnic grouping) and we (I) have placed our (my) trust in him. We found him via one of our tour guides, in fact we don't know him from Adam, but hey-ho. If he does a good job we will be delighted. If he fails I (not we) will be in deep shit. We both tried to book the train tickets but it was hard with no Indian ID, we would have cracked it eventually but we had our secret weapon - Tamil. So having left it late, then handed it to Tamil - we end up on the waiting list for tickets. Maybe two days, maybe four, before we know our fate.
RICK STAIN IN INDIA REVISITED
In the meantime Tamil provides a car to take us 100 miles south to the old French colony which only joined India in 1956, Paris of the east we call it. We book a hotel in the French Quarter of White Town. Long drive so we decide to break the journey in MAHALABALARPURAM, a temple site halfway. Why? Because in 2013 Rick Stein in India was broadcast and so I traced it on BBC iPlayer and watched it, and Rick praised the Seashore Garden to the sky. Best Madras Fish Curry in India he said. So lunch was to be there. The town was packed, so crowded, bloody Pungal festival. No matter, we visited the temples first. ​​​
We love a temple, at least early on we do. We can suffer from templeitis later in the trip, but we're OK here. Then on for a fabulous lunch. Their website painted a picture, palm frond covered beach side restaurant, and recommended to the skies by the sainted Rick - what could go wrong? Well time has been cruel to the Seashore Garden. It was a run down shack at the end of an alley. Disappointed? Us? No chance. If it's good enough for Rick it's good enough for us. Unfortunately as you can see from the pictures, they can't even spell the name of the man who has probably bought them a totally unjustified 1000 English customers......
I mean Risk STAIN? Seriously, your benefactor. You managed to take £13 off us for several beers, two excellent curries (and I DO recommend the Madras Fish Curry, I really do), a whole £13! At least do justice to Rick!
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PONDICHERRY - VENICE OF INDIA
Anyway, insult forgiven, on the road again. Roll into White Town district of Pondicherry, and impressed. Clean tidy, Frenchified, smart, most unusual for India. Rest of Pondy - normal chaos. I have no idea why this country has pavements. You literally, absolutely cannot walk along a pavement, they are all blocked, cluttered, and inaccessible, so everyone walks in the road, even on a main road. Flipping lethal. But as you can see inside our little (rich) district it was lovely, lots of married couples actually come here for pre-wedding street photos. Not that surprising really, everywhere else in Tamil Nadu is piled waist high with shit, at least here in White Town you can find a stretch of roadway wide enough to get a nice piccie without added bricks, rubbish, broken pipes and a pile of old shoes. They even have teams of guys with lights and big lenses. Just clean the place up guys.
GET ON YOUR BIKE - AGAIN
Pondicherry checked out - so it's off for a cycle tour of Senghara Forest, miles out of town. Deep in forest, good quality bikes, good guide, lots of info and some pretty sore arses. We need to get saddle hardened again. Sadly we struggle with the very broad Tamil accent. of all our guides to date. Bit like trying to understand an old highland Scotsman, or a Cornish fisherman, we get about one word in ten, nod wisely, smile, and then the cheeky sod on the bike tour has the nerve to test us on what he had said - chancing your tip mate!
Forests covered, then its cookery, a nice four hour course in cooking lunch. Great guide this time, Mannish, a lovely lady with perfect (almost) English pronunciation. So good that Sara repeated what she said in the market as AspaANUS? No Sara - Asparagus. You had to be there. And she calls ME deaf.
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Excellent market visit to buy fresh fish from a market totally manned by women (I know!), then the vegetable market totally womened by men. Weird. Total unmitigated chaos but very educational. It makes such a difference to have a really educated guide who actually knows their subject. Great cook too!
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And unusual for the local folk we have met so far - really chatty. She told us so much about life in India today. About the trials and tribulations, family, work. All the time making us slave over a hot stove, sweating and , coughing from the smoke before joining us for lunch. ​​​​
SEE! Fishmarket, not one single man in sight, unless you count Fido in the foreground, and he may be a she.
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On your left is a pic of the Head Chef enjoying a few minutes off his plates of meat, and enjoying a quick fag. It's hard in those Indian kitchens!
​As we have been limiting ourselves to one massively exciting outing a day cooking was it. So off for a drop of scran at a nice little diner, The Spot. Trendy, nice menu, cocktails included. Sara orders a cocktail, and another, and another. Manager comes over. "Madam, just so you know, those are doubles!" I can't write in an Indian accent, nor can I convey the slightly alarmed tone he used. You must use your imagination. Sara - " I'll have another one then!" And another, and another. What that girl won't do if she is challenged. Stood up, straight as a die, walked out onto a main road throbbing with traffic, and strode manfully (womanfully??) in the pitch dark straight back to our lodgings. With no real idea where she was. I waddled along behind checked my phone for Google maps at every junction.
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So it was a slow start in the morning.
TIME FOR SOME WOO-WOO CULTURE
Today (DAY 8, seems so much longer) we had to catch our train in the evening so paid a few bob more for an 8.00pm check out giving us the day to visit Auroville. I know, me neither, but Google it, just AUROVILLE. Proper woo-woo, cultish sort of thing, run by 'The Mother', seriously. Recognised by the Indian Government, massive (20 sq km), right up Sara's street - so off we trot. Have to say, very impressive. But like all cults, a few skeletons in the cupboard.
See what I mean, and that sight is a mile inside the perimeter, and you walk there. And the pic below shows how close you get to it, not. A very, very weird set up by any stretch of the imagination, and not without its detractors.
LATE NIGHT INDIAN TRAINS ARE ALWAYS AN ADEVNTURE
So we return, totally woo-woo'ed out, to catch our ride to VILLAPURAM, a one horse, one railway station town about an hour or so away, in order to intercept the famous ANATHAPURAM EXPRESS. A 13 hour journey across southern India in a two berth sleeper cabin. Class 1A A/C Coupe Sleeper, for the princely sum of £28 quid each. Both Sara and I had totally failed to beat the Indian Rail bureaucratic website into submission in our attempts to book tickets ourselves (and we count as pretty good at this shit) so we placed our faith yet again in the famed 'Tamil', a man we had never met. He said he was a small travel agent but realistically, he could be literally anyone!. I casually ask how we will get out tickets. "No problem sir, your driver will bring printed tickets". Driver appears. I check he has the printed tickets. "Yes, yes, tickets, get in car". Hour in the dark, railway station looks like Gaza on a good day. Driver - "You got tickets?". Me - "No YOU got printed tickets, look at Tamils Whatsapp message!". Yes, no problem. Wanders off. Comes back. Me- "You got tickets?" Driver - "Yes, I got my platform ticket now, important as otherwise police!, you got train tickets?" Fuck me! NO - YOU GOT TICKETS! I won't bore you with the several different iterations of the same diatribe, suffice it to say my darling was giving me serious side-eye as we lugged our cases up hill and down dale in search of the right platform, and our flipping driver speaks the lingo! We would have done a better job. Any road up, we finally settled on platform 4, got chatting to a young Indian businessman catching the same train. Result, he has the train location live on his phone. So a train pulls in, he panics, jumps on it yelling to us to do the same. Which we attempt not wanting to offend, even though seconds earlier he had shown me our train to be 15 minutes away. Wrong train!!! Finally, completely without any tickets, we wander up to that next train and ask the immaculately dressed guard if this is the right train, let alone the right carriage. He says "are you Brian and Sara?", and leads us to our lovely bunk for the night. Still with no tickets, no ID, no nothing., Go figure. Got to love Indian trains. Not a bad sleeping compartment either. So NOT first class, but it got us there.
SERIOUSLY? - YOU NEED THIS SIGN?
Before leaving the train I have to add this. A sign in the (remarkably old but remarkably clean) train toilet. ​
1. Third line down. PLEASE DO NOT SOIL THE TOILET SEAT IN THE WESTERN STYLE. I mean - WTF??? This is India? I have given credit that the toilet is now (2025) cleanish, but seriously, soil the seat in Western style, who are you kidding???????​
2. BRAILLE. Again, seriously, WTF? OK, I'm blind, I've found the loo, I can't see, so I can't even see that there is a fucking sign. Why would I care, why would I hunt for the sign? And if I did weirdly slap all the walls to find it in the strange assumption there is a sign somewhere for blind folk , why would I want to read it. Unless I was intent on soiling the seat and this sign explained to me that I really shouldn't do that. Lucky I finger read it!
So technically this brings us to KERALA, south west India, and we are going completely the reverse way round to our initial plan, with Sri Lanka last as opposed to first, all as a result of the Met Office weather app (not me).